THE DEMON HAUNTED WORLD by Carl Sagan

Author:Carl Sagan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: archivio inglese, cover, english
ISBN: 9780345409461
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-07T10:53:49+00:00

the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cigarette, constituting the greatest libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise; a criminal libel of such major proportions and implications that one wonders how such a crusade of calumny can be reconciled under the Constitution can be so flouted and violated [sic].

This rhetoric is only slightly more inflamed than what the tobacco industry has from time to time uttered for public consumption.

There are many brands of cigarettes that advertise low 'tar' (ten milligrams or less per cigarette). Why is this a virtue? Because it is the refractory tars in which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and some other carcinogens are concentrated. Aren't the low tar ads a tacit admission by the tobacco companies that cigarettes indeed cause cancer?

Healthy Buildings International is a for-profit organization, recipient of millions of dollars over the years from the tobacco industry. It performs research on second-hand smoke, and testi­fies for the tobacco companies. In 1994, three of its technicians complained that senior executives had faked data on inhalable cigarette particles in the air. In every case, the invented or 'corrected' data made tobacco smoke seem safer than the techni­cians' measurements had indicated. Do corporate research departments or outside research contractors ever find a product to be more dangerous than the tobacco corporation has publicly declared? If they do, is their employment continued?

Tobacco is addictive; by many criteria more so than heroin and cocaine. There was a reason people would, as the 1940s ad put it, 'walk a mile for a Camel'. More people have died of tobacco than in all of World War II. According to the World Health Organiza­tion, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020, in part because of a massive advertising campaign to portray smoking as advanced and fashionable to young women in the developing world. Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking and scientific method. Gullibility kills.

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